"Political language -- and with variations this is true of all political parties, from Conservatives to Anarchists -- is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind."
-- George Orwell, Politics and the English Language

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Tuesday, December 19, 2006

Lie-berry

This fun little nugget (link via TPM) is a precursor of things to come after Mister Man is through kicking the can to the next White House occupant.

The likelihood that the George W. Bush presidential library will be located at SMU has not been welcome news for at least one segment of the university community. A letter, dated December 16, from "Faculty, Administrators, & Staff" of the Perkins School of Theology to R. Gerald Turner, president of the Board of Trustees, is now circulating not only on the SMU campus but also among a wider academic community, urging the board to "reconsider and to rescind SMU's pursuit of the presidential library."

....

In addition to opposing Bush's policies, the letter writers raise their voices against the purported mission of the library itself. Their concerns are based on a New York Daily News story of November 27, which describes the future library as a $500 million center (the costliest presidential library ever), the purpose of which would be "to spread the gospel of a presidency that for now gets poor marks from many scholars and a majority of Americans."

The letter to Turner makes the point that there are "two fundamentally different visions of the Library": a neutral space for unbiased academic research conducted by scholars, or a conservative think tank and policy institute that engages in legacy polishing and grooms young conservatives for public office.

That's actually news to me; I was not aware that there was any vision competing with the latter assumption, that it would be designed to function essentially as a half-billion dollar handjob of the Worst Preznit Ever. It would take about that much to render his pony stable remotely palatable.

Forget supporting; if there is any serious non-hack academic research that just doesn't flat-out condemn these guys, I'd be astonished. There literally isn't anyone left besides Richard Cougar Melloncamp Scaife's bevy of cabana boys, and the closet-case evangelicals who want to snort crank off their tumescent cocks. That may qualify as "academic" the way Bob Jones University is a "university", but among reasonable folk, not so much.

But hey. If a bunch of Junior's mendicant donors and glad-handing douchebags want to drop that kind of coin into a low-attendance outhouse for the hard of thinkin', let 'em.